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My two cents would be Debian for its conventional and reliable base. Installation can be automated by pre-seeding answers to the installer questions.

After that, I would imagine openSUSE would be a good choice. It's not perfect, but it is reasonably reliable, generally more up-to-date than Debian, and there is a very large variety of packages available through OBS.

I don't know the intricacies of benchmarking, but I would imagine that early technology adopters like Fedora and Arch Linux would pose more challenges than they would solve.

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It should probably come down to which distro makes it easiest to get new software with minimal recompilation on your part while still starting from an established base. I know Ubuntu has PPAs and openSUSE has Open Build Service, so I think the choice really has to be one of those. Arch Linux has a lot of software but no established base, and Gentoo requires compiling a lot, and I don't think any other distro has something on a similar level to PPAs or OBS.

I would personally choose openSUSE because 1. I like it, 2. it is more desktop-agnostic than Ubuntu, 3. OBS supports ARM while PPA doesn't, 4. OBS supports things like automatic GIT (or other VCS) updates while PPA doesn't, 5. openSUSE has SUSE studio, which lets you easily roll custom livecds or USB images so you don't have to alter your system to test anything.

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Fedora or openSUSE.
More time pass more patches ubuntu will apply downstream and then more their stack will diverge from the tipical linux stack to an ubuntu-only staff that nobody cares about.
This is not omgubuntu.

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Fedora. I would personally much rather see Sabayon in there. But unfortunately it's not very well know and doesn't have a huge staff of volunteers or corporate backing.

Fedora on the other hand, is popular, have a corporate back like Ubuntu, and is bleeding edge enough to make it's evaluation a reflection of current linux development (as opposed to Debian for example).

Oh, and personally I only recently started using it in one laptop, while having a Gentoo server, two Debian and one Sabayon workstations around the house.

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Fedora is a mess. I've installed the latest version and it wasn't using my native language and I wasn't able to restart my computer, because the restart button didn't work. What a shame. Ubuntu is much more polished and user friendly, but Kubuntu is the best.

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If the benchmarks are to be made with Desktop Linux in mind, then Ubuntu is out. The latest moves made by Canonical make it very clear they are now a Mobile OS company. That their custom phone OS can do some desktop tasks when docked to a bigger screen is nice, but that doesn't make it a desktop Linux distro.

My guess would be one of these three:

OpenSUSE
Debian
Fedora

They have more or less regular releases and they are still "real" desktop distro's.

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Fedora is a mess. I've installed the latest version and it wasn't using my native language and I wasn't able to restart my computer, because the restart button didn't work. What a shame. Ubuntu is much more polished and user friendly, but Kubuntu is the best.

Kubuntu is probably the single most buggiest KDE distro and is regularly frowned upon when giving advice on which KDE distro to use.
Nearly every KDE-related bug I've helped people diagnose was related to Kubuntu and not KDE.

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Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS are the primary one I would like to see. But would also like one of Mandriva fork (Mageia or PCLinuxOS most likely) and Crunchbang, this last one simply because it an out of the box Openbox Debian, so could could same time in setting up has to have a lightweight distro, mostly for comparaison of DE impact on the benchmark result, has you will only have to deal with a windows manager, at least for the test where it could be relevant.

Not that I wouldn't like some Gentoo and Archlinux benchmark, but easy to understand how they would be troublesome, in the situation you are in, so not gonna ask for them.

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one million forks...we should only benchmark Ubuntu for now. Those silly rpm/deb etc. differences are p* me off. There's mostly one single, lonely, fat guy behind each distro...have a look at distrowatch. Or hey how about Sphinx os..hahaha..it even includes software to spy you.